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This story gives useful context to the NYT piece about the girl getting her college admission revoked for saying the n-word. If we're concerned about kids' lives being ruined for youthful mistakes, we have to reckon with which kids are most often affected
https://www.propublica.org/article/judges-are-locking-up-children-for-noncriminal-offenses-like-repeatedly-disobeying-their-parents-and-skipping-school
https://www.propublica.org/article/judges-are-locking-up-children-for-noncriminal-offenses-like-repeatedly-disobeying-their-parents-and-skipping-school
To be clear, I'm not saying that the girl having her college admission revoked is a good outcome. I don't love the revenge-porn aspect of releasing the footage. I'm generally pretty forgiving of teenage transgressions and I find mob justice troubling.
It's possible to think that, though, and also be concerned with how the media treats these stories. Over the last decade, national publications have built an amplification pipeline for anecdotes in which members of minority groups "over-react" to discrimination.
A single Oberlin student calling cafeteria sushi "cultural appropriation" was a national story. Last week, Fox News ran a piece about someone calling their neighbor's Christmas lights display an example of "systemic bias." https://www.foxnews.com/us/minnesota-residents-christmas-light-display-shamed-for-harmful-impact
It's hard to talk about these anecdotes because as soon as you ask why they're national news stories, someone accuses you of defending them. I guess you think that neighbor in Minnesota was right to send that letter, huh? Huh?
And it's true that at the individual level these stories are often indefensible. In the aggregate, however, they reinforce a meta-narrative that left-wing insensitivity is somehow a national crisis.
It's a big country. Conservatives also send dumb letters to their neighbors. They make baseless accusations against professors. They file silly lawsuits. The difference is that there is no amplification pipeline for these stories.
It's simply not the case that white teens are being barred from college admissions on a large scale due to saying racial slurs on Snapchat. If you're interested in the phenomenon of kids being over-punished for teenage mistakes, it would not lead you to highlight that story.
It's the same with all of these controversies. The vast majority of people fired unfairly are not victims of "cancel culture," they are victims of America's shitty labor laws. The threat to universities are funding cuts and meddling donors, not protests against Milo's dumb speech
Over and over again people tell us to get mad about an anecdote in which a member of the majority is the victim. They appeal to a broad principle about free speech or forgiveness — and ignore all the instances when the principle applies to someone who doesn't look like them.
